


Mouse Heart

by RyuuzaKochou



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Accidental Superpower Acquisition, Aged-Up Character(s), Finding your way, Gen, Marc & Marinette - BROTP, Mouse Miraculous, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 13:31:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19831243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyuuzaKochou/pseuds/RyuuzaKochou
Summary: To the hero or the civilian, all aftermaths look the same.





	Mouse Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all. Don't worry, I'm still working on my other stuff. This is just a plot bunny that would not leave me alone. So if it's a bit jagged and raw... yeah, that's why.
> 
> Authors Intro: I love Marc Anciel; he's a sweet, anxiety riddled, introverted cinnamon roll. And while I was thinking about which Miraculouses would go with which characters in the show, it occurred to me the only one remotely suited to the Mouse would be him. Thus, plot bunny.
> 
> It was meant to be a ficlet about Marc moving from an abusive household into Marinette's so she could Big Sister him and he could start having his own love square with Nathaniel. But I'm kind of already writing a Big Sister Marinette fic with 'Nigh', so instead it turned into a treatise on how teens cope with serious trauma in their adult years and how trauma is pretty much the same for a Hero as it is for everyone else. If there's one thing they can't really get at in the actual show, it's the fact that Marinette (and Adrien and the rest of them) would have emotional scarring from the things they go through, even if they win. They're thirteen and fourteen year old kids and their adult emotional support for combat fatigue is a 100+ year old man whom only two of them can actually contact and who is more interested in keeping them out there than bringing them in; that's going to lead to some trouble down the line. Also, they should be fucking up way more than they actually do on the show, because *fourteen*.

Just before the (media-dubbed) ‘Akuma Class’ has their lycee graduation ceremony, just before they’re all about to shake hands and part ways to universities or gap years or careers, Hawk Moth is defeated.

Considering the wreckage left in his wake, the final battle is amazingly anti-climatic. Ladybug went into the Agreste mansion one night. There’s a massive light show that still hasn’t been explained. Then Ladybug emerged to talk with the gathering police presence and quietly tells them that Hawk Moth is no more.

They’re so shocked they don’t notice how dead pale Ladybug is, how her hands shake at her sides.

Stories are spun like nets at the graduation ceremony. Gabriel Agreste under the thrall of a villain for years, his wife held hostage, his son a further thumbscrew. No wonder he became a recluse, they say. No wonder the family hasn’t been seen in public since, except for one brief press conference held by Adrien Agreste, who is elated and grieving by turns.

He doesn’t show up for his own graduation. He and his parents move out of France soon after, out of the public eye. Agreste Fashion still runs, but their boss is a head in a video chat at best. Nathalie Sancoeur becomes the physical face of the business and by all accounts runs the ship well.

Marc Anciel misses _all_ of this. He’s flat on his stomach in hospital for two months at this time, his father arrested and his stepmother already in the midst of divorce proceedings, ready to leave the country on a missionary retreat. Neither of them is ready or willing to accept that Marc’s lifestyle is more than ‘just a phase’.

Marc gets the villa in the legal proceedings, much to his stepmother’s disgust. She believes in an austere life in general terms not specific. But it was Marc’s mothers and she left it to him in her will; an airtight arrangement his father hadn’t thought to argue.

That’s the only reward. He’d meant, he’d _wanted_ so badly to see Nathaniel at graduation, to take him up on his offer to travel to the United States. Instead he ended up texting frantic lies from a hospital room about a once in a lifetime writers retreat, desperate that nobody knows what happened, that _nobody knows_. He is, in a perverse sort of way, grateful for the Hawk Moth thing. It soaks the attention of Paris, leaving his mystery status an uninteresting sidenote, soon dismissed.

He knows Nathaniel is disappointed. He leaves without fanfare, without a goodbye.

Of the myriad of Marc’s scars, that one goes in the deepest.

But he goes on. His stepmother vanishes; he can’t bring himself to miss her one bit. When he’s well enough to go home, he boxes up his father’s stuff and either shoves it into the storage facility the governments arranges for inmates or donates to whatever charity will take it and then burns the rest. The villa is big, empty and clean. If there is ever a lingering pang of regret for what he and his father came to, the pull of scars on his back when he moves the wrong way is quick to remind him not to dwell.

The sun comes up. Life goes on.

Marc starts an online study course, trying to catch up on what he missed in the last few months of lycee. He gets work as an editor of silly little blogs and news sites, which he turns into a small but thriving freelance fact-checking and editing business. He’s clever, he’s thorough and he has a library full of books and an unlimited data plan. He works on commission doing little jobs but a lot of them. He sticks mostly to non-fiction editing; fiction gives him an itch to correct some of his subscribers language and plot problems, which is not what they’re paying him for, so he steers clear.

He doesn’t write his own stuff anymore. At least, not that will ever see the light of day.

He goes to a therapist because it turns out spending your formative years being relentlessly watched for any sign of deviant behaviours gives you a metric tonne of bad coping mechanisms. There are times when he just lays in bed and stares at walls, willing himself to leave his body. He forever feels malevolent eyes on him wherever he goes. Sometimes his lungs implode and he curls up on the floor, trying to remember to breathe. He’s not on social media, he doesn’t involve himself in forums any more than what’s needed for his research and he never, ever goes out to meet people. If not for the therapist Marc would probably have locked the gate to the villa and never come out, a hermit living on grocery deliveries and Netflix. Hell; if not for the therapist, he’d have gone years without speaking to anyone at all.

As it was, he still gets panic attacks going anywhere during the day. He can only go out at night, where people hunch down into their clothes and carefully look at nothing but the sidewalk. Not at him. Never at him.

*

The thing about doing contract editing for news sites is that he’s often the first in the know, not that he has anyone to tell. He knows things about Paris that no one else does.

For example; no one has seen Chat Noir since Hawk Moth’s defeat. They _have_ seen Ladybug though, because while Hawk Moth is gone there are still akumas. It was never very well explained, but the last of the akumas hadn’t been purified in the final battle; Ladybug had had too much on her hands to do. So while Hawk Moth could no longer make more of them, the last of them had multiplied and hovered in the corners and crannies of Paris, latching on to people when the opportunity presented itself. They weren’t very powerful anymore without Hawk Moth’s will to drive them but they were made for one purpose and they were numerous.

Ladybug was stuck mopping up Hawk Moth’s mess alone.

Marc didn’t pay very much attention to it. Thinking of superheroes made him think of Nate.

In hindsight, this was an error.

Because one night, after having to skirt around a police cordon around an entire district while they got an akuma out of it, Marc stumbled on Marinette sitting in a filthy alley, crying her eyes out.

“Oh Marc,” he could see her visibly try to pull herself together. She flashed him a winning smile. It was jarring because Marc was _thorough_ and picked up on details and that smile was one he’d seen in a thousand variations at a thousand press conferences.

“Ladybug,” was the first, thoughtless word that blurted from his mouth. He didn’t know why he said it. Afterwards, Fu would tell him that luck was a mysterious force indeed, to put the exact right thought in the exact right place and the exact right moment.

“Don’t worry,” Marinette said in what can only be described as Ladybug’s voice. “The akuma is cleansed, everything will be alright now.”

Marc noticed _details_. His mouth dropped open. Once the veil protecting Ladybug’s identity was gone, it was _gone._

Nothing but ignored and misdirected details started to flood his brain.

“ _Marinette_?”

She stared at him. Looked down at her bare, ungloved hands....

And screamed.

*

Marc helped her stumble home. She didn’t live above the bakery anymore. She lived in a rundown little one-bedroom in a crummy neighbourhood near the rattle of a train line. Nate’s instagram showed him living in a similar apartment in his first year in the US. A lot of their classmates had slummed it like that.

None of them had stayed there for long. It had been ten years since they’d all parted.

The whole thing was surreal. This was not the right destiny for Marinette Dupain-Cheng, who’d been designing for haute couture fashion empires when she was thirteen years old.

Her body wasn’t even right. She looked as strung out as an addict, deep circles under her eyes and hair lank, not a spark of the usually glittering enthusiasm that had graced their teen years. If she’d been a character in one of Marc’s hidden-away novels, she’d be the fossilized cynic lurking at the edge of the plot, guiding a new hero to their destiny against their better judgement.

Not the bright centre. Not the Ladybug.

As Marc struggled to find space in between dressmakers dummies and fabric bolts, he noticed a half empty bottle of alcohol planted on a card table that might function as a dining table. There was an empty one in the trash can.

Marc breathed.

Marinette was sitting on the bed, knees drawn up to her chest. She was no longer upset, she’d had time to cry herself out and panic on the trip over here. Now she just watched him, too exhausted to be anything but amused. “Of all the alleys in all the cities, you had to come into mine,” she quips.

“Just lucky I guess,” Marc mutters back. “Except that’s from the wrong movie.”

She snorts a laugh. Marc feels his chest loosen slightly.

But problem is that after that icebreaker, there’s still a metric tonne of ice. She’s huddled up like a spider in a fire, looking like she was searching for something, anything to say. She gives up, apparently, because all that comes is a wry. “Ask me anything you want.”

Oh, fuck that. Marc’s not going to interrogate her when she’s like this. Marinette hauled him kicking and screaming out of his quiet corner once; she got him breathing and tasting life. She made him _brave_.

“I wasn’t at a writers retreat,” Marc says instead.

He can tell his apropos response has startled her. He looks down at his nails and gives himself a mental note to redo the polish, because it’s chipped badly. There’s no limit to the amount of fuck-yous he wants to levy against his father, even sight unseen, so he paints his damn nails every week.

He refocuses; he’s started the story, he can’t leave it at an impotent, unexplained cliffhanger. “After lycee. I know I told everyone that. I was in hospital.”

Marinette looks both bewildered and concerned. “You were sick?”

Marc shook his head and sucked in air. “My father threw me down the stairs and then beat me with a belt until the screaming stopped.”

Marinette jerked like he’d punched her.

“He just... he’d had enough. They’d tried everything, yeah? My stepmother must have brought in every priest in Paris. There were Christian councillors. Bible studies. Awful fucking dates with empty eyed _girls_ I wouldn’t have liked even if I was bi. Trips to _brothels_ , Jesus, those still give me the heebie jeebies. And every summer, without fail, conversion therapy. Every. Single. Fucking. Summer.

“Until I turned eighteen, of course,” Marc continued flatly. “That’s when the house – my mothers house – became mine. I could kick them out if I wanted. I could go to the US with... with Nate if I wanted. _I could do anything I wanted_. Legally, I mean. I was dumb enough to say it to his face instead of just...leaving and having mom’s lawyers send an eviction notice. So hey, lesson learned there, I guess.”

Marinette was crying. “I’m Ladybug. I made a deal with Hawk Moth to get him to stop. He found out who I was; I never found out how. He told me to come or... he told me to come. I think Agreste was just as tired of being a villain as we were being Heroes by then.”

Marc willed himself not to blink. “What did he want?”

“Emilie,” Marinette had tears sliding down her cheeks. “She was in this enchanted sleep. He wanted to wish her awake. We told him that someone else he loved would have to sleep instead because it’s all about _balance_ , you see? Nathalie tried to volunteer. Nooroo suggested that instead of one person taking on the burden of the wish, we could divide the burden; a gift from each person she loved. He was the kwami of generosity, he could channel the wish that way.

“I couldn’t give her anything,” Marinette continued dully. “I didn’t know her. But Gabriel and Nathalie and... and Adrien could. So they did.”

“Gabriel gave up his knowledge to give her back her mind,” Marinette explained. “He doesn’t remember Hawk Moth or Miraculouses or kwamis. That was _my_ deal for him. I still had the power to ruin him, I’d left videos under a dead man’s switch. He didn’t fight me on it. Nathalie gave up her strength to give her back her body. She’s going on but I know her health isn’t right these days.

“Adrien gave up his love. His love for Ladybug, he said. He thought it would be fine because she’d never loved him back, right, only his _father_ never told him that Ladybug was _me_.

“Do you know what love is, Marc?” Marinette swiped at the tear tracks. “Love is _memories_. He remembers going to school. He remembers Alya and Nino and he remembers being Chat Noir. He remembers _everything_ except...”

“You,” Marc’s voice was leaden.

“I... I picked the easy way out, you know? We were about to leave school and I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to have a life, a real life. I didn’t fight him. I didn't spike his guns, disarm him. I didn’t go to the authorities. I didn’t go to the media and de-transform. Emilie was all he wanted in the end and a part of the magic was that Nooroo was free to renounce _him_ if he did this. It would all be over, then. I should have listened to Tikki. She said we shouldn’t give up, that we could still fight. I just wanted the nightmares to stop. I wanted to get eight hours of sleep every night, I wanted to not have to cram in study into every minute of leisure because who knows if I’d have the time after an attack? I wanted to not live on eggshells around my friends when they all hated me for blowing them off. I wanted to stop rejecting internships in Milan and New York and London, I wanted to stop careering endlessly towards the bad reputation I was building for myself. I wanted to stop seeing the look in my parents eyes when I lied to them again. I wanted... I wanted...” she clenched her fists, then relaxed. “But you never get what you want trying to cheat, do you? I pontificated about that often enough.”

Marc didn’t dare comment on the supposed ‘cheat’ that was the decision making process of a PTSD riddled eighteen year old. He’d been through his own therapy and he was still agoraphobic. He still hated being watched by anyone, still had panic attacks in crowds. Sometimes if he looked down the main staircase he tells himself he can still see blood in between the flagstones, no matter how hard he worked to scrub it out.

He knew that some marks just don’t scrub out and wash away.

He understood how fast and how hard your brain could turn on you.

How desperation made you stupid.

He didn’t blame her one bit. There were plenty of others with greater sins in their ledgers.

“Where is... Tikki? That’s your kwami, right?” Marc said in lieu of a vile diatribe of swearing he wanted to give on Marinette’s behalf.

Marinette tapped her earrings. “The wish was a lot of magic. She’s resting for now. She comes out occasionally but I told her to recharge as long as she needs. I still transform fine. She told me at her last visit that she was close to replenished so maybe she can come out permanently soon. It’ll be nice to have her here again,” Marinette added wistfully.

“What about Carapace and Rena Rouge? And Bunnyx?” Marc didn’t mention Queen Bee. Chloe had improved dramatically but she’d never be called the sympathetic type.

Marinette shrugged sadly. “They had their lives to get to. I visited them after it was all over and Chat was... gone. They were leaving France. I could see in their eyes they were worried I would ask them to stay... so I didn’t. They’d earned retirement.”

Marc glowered. They damn well hadn’t. “So, you’re on your own.”

Marinette shrugged. “Just me and my silly little design business. I do commissions for people; cosplays and theatre costuming mostly. Sometimes I do dolls as well.”

This from a designer who’d handled rock stars and style queens.

And she’d accepted it. He could see it in her eyes. She thought this was some kind of sick penance because she made a bad choice as an inexperienced teenager.

Marc didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, the ceiling started to drip on his head. While Marinette apologised and searched for the trash can, Marc formulated a plan.

“Do you have an overnight bag?”

“What? Oh, yeah,” Marinette said absently. “For when I visit my parents.”

“Great. Grab it,” Marc rose to his feet. “We’ll get the rest of your stuff tomorrow.”

Marinette stared at him.

“I have a six bedroom villa with a private garden, natural lighting, free wifi and a view to die for. I could use a roommate to help me pay land taxes and to keep me from going fucking crazy when idiot authors try to correct the research they ask me for. You in?”

Marinette closed her mouth. Looked at the steel in his eyes. Then...

“You had me at the wifi.”

*

It works out astonishingly well.

Marinette can bake, Marc can cook. She takes the day shift which means she’s in charge of getting groceries and going to farmers markets and libraries and occasionally walking him through a breathing exercise when he looks at the flagstones or catches the eyes of a stranger on the street. He takes the night shift, which means he does all their internet shopping, handles her accounts and sits on her bed and holds her when the nightmares come.

She actually cries when coming home from her parents after the first month, because they’re so relived she’s getting more sleep, that she’s looking better. She signs him up for various forums as a thank you and challenges him to write long twitter threads about his research into everything, which is more social than he’s been in a long time.

She handles the phones, he handles the e-mails. They split bills and she’s still hilariously mad that he won’t let her pay a cent more in rent.

They’re not two broken halves making a whole. But they’ve certainly got more pieces between them together than apart.

*

“This...is a bad idea,” Marc tells his best friend six months later.

He knows from bad ideas. This is one of them.

“You keep saying I need help,” Marinette tells him innocently.

“ _Professional_ ,” Marc stressed, trying not to stare too much at the... the kwami floating in front of him. “Professional help, Mari.” He’s not truly serious. Marinette’s been seeing a therapist for three months now. She has anti-anxiety medicine to help her sleep instead of self medicating nightmares away with alcohol. Dealing with the withdrawal had sucked for all concerned but Marinette had been unwavering. She stopped dead and she dealt with the aftermath like a boss.

When Marinette decided to go cold turkey, she went arctic.

“I’m not a hero, Mari,” Marc cracked eventually, deciding to give dignity a miss. “I still can’t go grocery shopping in daylight! I have panic attacks! I’m not cut out for this. I won’t know what the hell to do!”

“It’s sweet but insane for you to assume I knew a damn thing about what I was doing when I was thirteen, Marc. It really is,” Marinette replied to this unsympathetically. “Now come on. I need backup and you are literally my only option.”

Marc sighed. “What was your name again?”

“Mullo,” the Mouse Miraculous replied patiently. “You should not have any doubt, young Master Marc. I am the kwami of augmentation and I am here to help.”

“I believe Mullo is an excellent choice for you, young man, as it will allow you to grant Ladybug all the allies she needs.”

Marc whipped around furiously and jabbed a finger at Master Fu. “No comments from the peanut gallery! You’re still on probation, mister!”

His first meeting with Fu had not been friendly.

He hadn’t actually punched the old man, but only because he was old.

He’s shaken him like a maraca, though, while yelling at the top of his voice about _combat fatigue_ and _PTSD_ and _chronic depression oh my god are you fucking blind_? Needless to say, Marc wasn’t about to let the old fool forget his role in this whole clusterfuck anytime soon.

Fu wisely just held up his hands in supplication.

Marinette looked hopelessly amused by all of this. It was honestly a better reaction than the ones she still had in the middle of the night sometimes where Marc had to sprint from his room to hers and hold her until the screaming stopped.

“Okay,” Marc gave in. “If we’re committing to something this stupid then we are at least doing it smart. What’s the code word or magic spell or what?”

“Mullo, let’s roar.”

Marc raised an eyebrow.

Mullo shrugged his grey shoulders. “We are small, but mighty.”

Marc sighed and gripped the pendant. “I’m going on record as saying I already regret this. Mullo, let’s roar!”

*

It wasn’t actually as bad as Marc feared. Marinette had been right; a whole boatload of extra skills and powers automatically uploaded to the brain when transformed.

Marinette would know, of course. When she was Ladybug, she didn’t have anxiety or depression or insomnia. Sometimes when it was really bad she slept transformed. It worked.

And he couldn’t deny he liked the outfit. He was pale grey all over, like a ghost in the night. He had silent-treading boots, tight fitting gloves and a hood with two little faux pockets up top that looked like little mouse ears. He didn’t have a domino; he had a ninja face mask with radiating lines that looked like whiskers. His bola draped elegantly around his waist with a long loop at the back to make his mousey tail.

It could have been worse. He looked like a ninja who had faded in the wash; but still, a ninja.

And he could _fight_. Marc Anciel had never even thrown a punch before, not even as Reverser.

“Ready?” Ladybug asked him.

They viewed their enemy; an akuma whose tattoos made people do his bidding. They didn’t really give themselves names anymore.

“On my way,” he swung down via his bola and dropped silently (as a ninja! Squee!) into the midst of the akumas minions. He spun his bola once, twice, thrice then “ _Multitude!_ ”

The three prongs of the bola hit the ground. Wherever they touched a shadowy form, a silhouette of _him_ rose up, eyes aglow. The Multitude went after the minions, quietly and easily dispatching them, and leaving a clear path for Ladybug to Lucky Charm her way to the takedown.

It was all going so well, so of course it backfires on him when it’s over.

The akuma had been at an artists convention.

So who should he turn around to see on the street as people rushed over but _Nathaniel fucking Kurtzberg_.

 _Oh god, he’s taller than I remember_. Tall and lean and oh so handsome and the pendant is flashing and Ladybug is up on the roof waving to him and the crowd and his lips are just delicious looking and his pendant is flashing and fucking hell he’s actually talking to me.

“...know there was another superhero in Paris,” Nate had his ever present sketchbook at the ready. His eyes light up just like they always did when he talked about heroes. It was still wrenchingly endearing. “That was really something you did there. Can I have your name? Could I draw you?”

“Like one of your French girls,” he blurts and then starts strangling his own brain. _Why did you do that? Why?_

Nate’s blushing. He’s actually fucking blushing. “I’d usually buy you a coffee before I got to that stage. So, uh, anyway...name?”

“Name,” he repeated blankly. “Name, right, huh, name, of course. I uh, have one of those. Right, um... you don’t know my name, right?”

Nate was bemused. His red hair was falling charmingly over glittering ear cuffs. “That’s right; you have to tell me what it is.”

He had a name. It was a good, solid, Dickensian name, as befitting a would-be writer.

Except he can’t remember it right now.

The pendant is really flashing now.

“You’re a real hero, you know,” Nate continued, oblivious.

 _This_ he could respond to.

Sort of. His stock response to this is ‘I’m just standing in her shadow’, because Ladybug is and always will be the centre.

What comes out is; “Mumblemumblemumbleshadow.”

“...Shadow? You’re Shadow?”

“Uh,” his pendant is going nuts. He either rolls with it or dies of humiliation. “That’s right, I’m Shadow. Just...uh, Shadow. Um, Igottagonicetomeetyoubye!” and bolas for his life.

*

“Shut up.”

Marinette keeps laughing.

“ _Shut up_.”

Marinette falls off the couch.

Marc glowers at her. Mullo looks on with peaceful interest.

“You,” Marc tells her snottily. “Are _hardly_ one to throw stones, Dupain-Cheng. Your lycee years were like a screwball comedy soap opera.”

Marinette quiets down. “Is there such a thing as a screwball comedy soap opera?”

Marc’s face screws up. “No, but now I kinda want there to be one.”

Marinette puts a hand on her cheek. “Shadow. It’s not a bad name for you, you know. You were always observing from the shadows for as long as I can remember.”

Marc grunted sullenly. “I really wanted to be Basil Patterfoot. And shut up, The Great Mouse Detective was a _classic_ , you heathen.”

Marinette giggled. “Shadow rolls off the tongue better.”

It did do that, he guessed.

They didn’t talk about Nate anymore than they ever mentioned Adrien’s name. They were trying to build a life out of fragile, shattered bits of themselves. They tried not to cut themselves on the sharp edges as much as they could.

Their motto was that they could always talk about it tomorrow.

“So,” Marc intoned, because he’d been waiting to make this joke for a while now. “What are we doing tonight, Brain?”

Marinette smiled at him, at his understanding. “The same thing we do every night, Pinky. We try to save the world.”

*

**Author's Note:**

> I can see a fic where Nathaniel comes back and Adrien comes back and it's Shenanigans Galore with Marc and Mari swapping notes over ice cream while the other two are hilariously confused about what their actual relationship is. Screwball Comedy Soap Opera. Be careful what you wish for, Marc.
> 
> Don't know if I'll ever write it, but if I did, this would be the intro.


End file.
